The Journey: Destiny of All

                             The Road goes ever on and on
                             Down from the door where it began.
                             Now far ahead the road has gone,
                             And I must follow, if I can,
                             Pursuing it with weary feet,
                             Until it joins some larger way,
                             Where many paths and errands meet.
                             And whither then?  I cannot say. (Fellowship 82)
Stepping out onto the road is a chance all humanity takes.  This road may symbolize the future, the course of life, or perhaps the road is not long but either wide or narrow.  Nevertheless, the road begins where the feet stand, but where the feet will stand at the end of is often unknown.  In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is one who literally and figuratively is on the road to Mt. Doom and back again.  Many, like Frodo, take journeys in their lives—few as daring—but on the earth that Frodo walked lies the journey inside all of us. 
         In literature, the journey is a reflection of reality, of the lives of human beings on this earth.  The writer actively moves in the journey of the characters and heroes, placing them in fantasy and myth, allowing their steps to be illuminated as they walk toward death.  What lies beyond that?  Hope only knows, because the real story is not yet finished. 
         Yet before a journey is taken, one has to consider what the journey is, literally.  What is a physical journey?  Is it merely walking from one place to another?  Or is it more about the adventure faced within that journey?  Many who think of a journey envision a long hike or a cross country trip.  The journey often brings forth images of a path or a road, an old traveling pack, a walking stick, finding a place of self-renewal, or perhaps a warm home at the end of a long walk.  Some think of what happens between the beginning and the end of the journey—the cold, snow, mountains, fields of grass, weariness, a lack of water, or terrifying animals and monsters.  Oftentimes, the destination beyond these threats is unknown and takes courage to reach; travelers may have no experience of what they are searching for or where they are going; therefore, the journey implies ignorance (Auden 40).  The journey, essentially, is starting out at one place and moving forward to another.
         That is the purpose of the journey, but it goes deeper.  What do journeys do for those who take them?  Does the purpose lie in what is ahead; the unknown destination, treasure and wealth, the warm meal awaiting the weary traveler? Or is the journey about what is left behind, stepping out on one’s own and leaving what is familiar, or leaving with the intent of coming back, bringing hope and restoration?  The purpose can be in both.  W.H. Auden explored the past and future of the journey in his essay “The Quest Hero.”  He used the images of a road and a city: “The only characteristic common to both images is a sense of purpose; a road, even if its destination is invisible, runs a certain direction; a city is built to endure and be a home” (41).  The past is the home, what is familiar and what the hero traveler wants to remain secure; the road is the uncertain future, though it may run in a predictable direction.  Drawing on both of them, one can move forward to face great unknowns, while being sure of the unchanging past.
         The purpose of the journey may lie in the act of doing something, of going on an adventure, performing heroic acts.  While heroic acts for the sake of heroism may be a purpose in itself, usually heroic acts are done in order to gain or find something.  Within a journey, one may encounter a quest.  As Auden points out, a quest is to be in search of something (40).  This could be a great treasure horde, an evil enemy, or it could be a beautiful princess locked up in a tower.  The quest is used to find and possess something precious (Bettridge 28).  The journey takes on an aspect of the quest in J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.  It has the precious element, but the journey is not to find what is precious, but instead this precious item has become a threat and a burden.  Tolkien reverses the purpose of the journey—instead the quest is to get rid of something: “the Ring and its threat to the safety of Middle-earth” (Bettridge 28).  The hero does not want to possess the Ring—the embodiment of Sauron, the evil force within Middle-earth who must be destroyed.  Frodo Baggins, Tolkien’s little hero, has the immense task of going on what is, essentially, an anti-quest, going to cast something away, but the process of doing that forces him to lose what really is precious to him; as Verlyn Flieger says, “Frodo’s is a journey from light into darkness—and out again” (42).  Darkness can reveal and change the hero; in the darkness the ultimate task is completed.  Frodo comes back out into the light, and his story remains an essential quest story, which Auden outlines.
         Auden begins with the subject of the quest: the object or person to be found.  The next element falls to the actual quest, the long journey in search of the object, which the hero, another element, must go on in order to find and obtain the object.  Only the hero can do this; it is his or her singular destiny.  The tests along the way prove this destiny and reveal the hero to be, in fact, the actual hero of the story (44).  Flieger specifies these tests as the monsters of the journey that oppose the hero.  The monsters are the physical embodiment of evil that the hero must overcome; they are the forces “against which the hero’s strength and courage are tested” (58).  These monsters could act as the guardians of the object that are meant to be fought and overthrown, but heroes, though they journey alone, have helpers who aid in overthrowing the monsters and obtaining the object the hero is searching for (Auden 44).  All these elements are found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, making it a story of a journey taken by a young hobbit, to find what he does not know.

The Journey in The Lord of the Rings
         The beginning of that young hobbit’s journey is in the Shire, but the journey does not continue there; the adventure moves beyond this place.  The hero of a journey must leave behind safety and comfort—familiarity—to find adventure.  This is the past, what is secure, what is home.  The Shire’s inhabitants possess a naïve, childlike quality, making it a safe and ignorant, though comfortable, home and a difficult place to leave (Bettridge 27).  This is a cheerful place filled with carefree people who mind their own business and are quite unconcerned the world beyond their borders.  Tolkien, himself, noted that hobbits “love peace and quiet and good-tilled earth” (Fellowship 1).  They were not ones for “happenings” of any sort.  In fact, those who journey forth outside of the Shire are viewed as odd or “cracked”; they are not like normal, simple hobbits. 
         Bilbo Baggins, who went there and back again to the Lonely Mountain and, in that process, won the Ring from the creature Gollum, is Frodo’s uncle.  The fact that Frodo is the nephew to Bilbo is a trait that connects him to medieval motifs of heroes—the favored nephew of a well-known and wealthy hobbit—and the task of bearing the Ring is passed down to him (Flieger 53-4).  Frodo already has a destiny set before him, though he still lives in the Shire and is unaware of this destiny.  He is the ignorant hero at the beginning of the quest and is narrow-minded just like the other hobbits (Bettridge par. 16).  Journeys beyond the borders of the Shire are unnatural to hobbits, who are completely engrossed in their world and their “good-tilled earth”; they are unconcerned about what happens beyond what they know.  So when a great evil force comes into Frodo’s hand, he responds, “How, how on earth did it come to me?” (Fellowship 55). 
         Frodo is merely a small hobbit, but he is the hero of Middle-earth, but this is something he would never have chosen for himself.  He is even an unlikely choice for the journey.  Usually in a quest story, the hero “desires to undertake the quest and, even when to others he appears lacking in power, he is confident of success,” because he has the ability to fulfill the task— therefore, who the hero becomes is dependent upon who the hero already is (Auden 54).  Heroes are gifted with the ability to fulfill the mission and are naturally endowed with gifts, powers, or rights that make them the best for the task at hand.  Aragorn is such a hero.  According to Flieger, the hero is fulfilled either by the “larger-than-life” hero, reflected in Aragorn, or the “little man” hero, reflected in Frodo (41).  Aragorn has all the elements—his sword, his roots, his past—that make him great and better suited for the task of carrying the Ring; in fact, it should be his task—he is Isildur’s heir, and the Ring is Isildur’s Bane (44).  Aragorn would seem to be the one for the job; even Gandalf, the wizard to whom Frodo offers the Ring, would seem to be better suited for the task of carrying the burden.
         Frodo is unlike Gandalf and Aragorn who have the skills and desire and even the right to fulfill their missions and his mission.  Frodo would rather not carry his burden, but because there are greater forces at work, the Ring is in his hands, and so he must go; it is his task (Auden 55).  Frodo tells Gandalf before his journey has even begun, “I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?” (Fellowship 67).  Journeys are unnatural to hobbits, and Frodo is an unnatural hero.  He does not know why he must carry the Ring, or why Bilbo left it to him.  He actually offers the Ring to Gandalf to put his responsibility onto someone else, while he would rather remain in the comfort of the Shire where evil seems nonexistent.  Frodo thinks he knows his own capabilities and limitations, but he accepts the “intolerable” burden, even though he thinks he is not the proper one to bear it (Flieger 50). 
         Frodo wishes this had never happened to him, but he receives the encouraging words of Gandalf the wizard: “So do all who live to see such times.  But that is not for them to decide.  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us” (Fellowship 55-56).  Frodo receives the call to the journey, though he has no idea of what is ahead.  Joseph Campbell calls this the “passing of the threshold,” and “whether small or great, and no matter what the stage of life, the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration—a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth” (51).  The time has come for Frodo to step out onto the road where the future is unclear and the amount of change is infinite. 
         This is Frodo’s destiny; he is the hero that crosses the threshold of adventure to destroy the threat of a ring that has the power to destroy those that bear it (Spacks 93).  The Ring only has the power to destroy; it cannot be used for good, no matter how much a person may try.  In fact, the stronger that the Ring-bearer is, the stronger the temptation to use the Ring for personal purposes, and therefore strengthen power, “and this means that the whole machinery of ancient fairy tales can be employed with someone not at all heroic…as the central figure.  Frodo knows he is ‘not made for perilous quests,’” and yet no one else is better suited for the quest (Sale 253).  In this sense, Frodo is the natural hero; because the Ring is so powerful, Frodo can be the hero because he is not powerful.  He does not want to enslave all of Middle-earth; his own power is not bent in the way of Men, who are meant to lead the world—he just wants his Shire to be kept safe.  This makes him the right candidate: “Not everyone has a destiny: only the hero who has plunged to touch it, and has come up again—with a ring” (Campbell 228).  But in Frodo’s case, he comes up not with a ring, for that he has utterly destroyed, but with a renewed Middle-earth.  This is his destiny.  Just as Gandalf said, “I can put it not plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker.  In which case you were also meant to have it.  And that is an encouraging thought” (Fellowship 61).
         The road ahead of Frodo is not easy; the end, as well as the way to go, is unknown; Frodo heads east though Gandalf is not there to guide him in the right direction (Bettridge 28).  This next step is what takes Frodo down into the darkness where threats abound, but into what ultimately changes him.  Joseph Campbell describes it this way: “In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the ‘purification of the self,’ when the senses are ‘cleansed and humbled,’ and the energies and interests ‘concentrated upon transcendental things’…this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past” (101).  The journey into the darkness transforms the past—what was known, one’s childlike experience; the hero’s thoughts are changed in this process of the journey; and discoveries are made about the self and the surrounding world.
         But this part is not a simple “there and back again.”  This is the unknown road with unknown direction and unknown threats; threats that test heroes and prove their strength and ability.  On this journey, Frodo faces several threats like the desire to disappear and forget responsibility, the fear of death within the barrow, losing Gandalf in the Mines of Moria, Shelob’s lair and the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, and finally Mt. Doom (Zimbardo 69).  These are moments when the road was tough and the end did not appear reachable.  How was Frodo supposed to go on without Gandalf, his guide?  What would Frodo have done if he did not have Gollum to lead him into Mordor?  Would the story have ended if Sam had not taken the Ring when Frodo lay helpless, stung with Shelob’s venom?  These were legitimate threats that could have left Middle-earth in darkness.  Yet, through all of these moments of doubt and struggle and fear, Tolkien matches them with moments of healing and fellowship (Zimbardo 69).  As Frodo tells Sam on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, imagining what their story would be like, “You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read anymore.’  ‘Maybe,’ said Sam, ‘but I wouldn’t be one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different’” (Two Towers 364).  This is a moment where, though they are stuck in the worst of places—the edge of Mordor—that there is encouragement and hope that their journey might be fulfilled and remembered by all. 
         But this moment is just a moment, and the journey must be continued into Mordor, to Mt. Doom.  This journey into Mordor is Frodo’s final test, the ordeal he must pass through in order to reach what Verlyn Flieger would call his apotheosis; because it is on this journey to Mordor and in the final moments at the Cracks of Doom, where the Ring was made, that the crucial event in all medieval hero-stories takes place: “the confrontation and struggle with the monstrous foe, embodiment of all the forces of darkness” (55).  Frodo has journeyed into the darkness and now he must battle it.  Yet, in the final moments, Frodo takes the Ring for himself, claiming, “The Ring is mine!” (Return 239).  If not for the creature Gollum, Frodo would not have succeeded in his quest. 
         The journey was not easy, but through it all, Frodo holds onto his virtue amidst adversity and opposition (Spacks 86).  He does not give in to the power of the Ring or into fear of what unknown lay ahead.  Frodo conquers by  “meeting to the best of his ability the demands of the way he has chosen, preserving his unique identity, and serving the needs of the All while never really knowing the whole of its design” (Zimbardo 70).  Frodo did what he set out to do, not because he wanted fame and glory, but because it was his task to do.  He did not go on this journey for mere adventure.  As Sam says, “that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.  Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it.  But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on” (Two Towers 362).  Though they faced many threats on their journey, they pressed on.  They continued their journey, because it was theirs to take, and it was one that really mattered.
         It mattered for the whole of Middle-earth, because that is what Frodo saves.  The end of the quest comes, as Auden says, with the winning of the object for the common good of the society (46).  Frodo destroyed the Ring and brought peace—the end of the quest is achieved.  Though Frodo lost an object, he gained the freedom of Middle-earth from the evil of Sauron.  In his essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien recounts this final moment of the journey: “we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame and rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through” (87).  There is a moment in stories when all seems hopeless but the truth comes out in the happily ever after, when the tide turns and what we really wanted to happen, happens, and makes the story worth it.  The joy is seen as Frodo proclaims, “the Quest is achieved” (Return 241), Aragorn is crowned king, and the hobbits finally make their way back to the Shire, back home.  Joseph Campbell calls this the return journey, where the hero begins “the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may rebound to the renewing of the community” (193).  Frodo needs to bring the peace of Middle-earth back with him, back to the Shire, so that his home and fellow hobbits can experience the peace that he won for them.
         Yet, while Frodo succeeds in his journey into darkness, he is wounded and has returned changed.  “There is no real going back,” he tells Gandalf.  “Though I may come to the Shire, it will not be the same, for I will not be the same.  I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden” (Return 290).  Frodo pays for his success and he cannot live in it; he must give up the Shire so that others may have it (Auden 61).  The Shire was won, but not for Frodo to keep; his part in the history of the world is over, though he did much to save it.  While his deeds and the actions of others brought the saving of Middle-earth to pass, “it betokens…a conviction of the waking mind that the reality of the deep is not belied by that of the common day” (Campbell 228).  No one else can experience what Frodo has gone through.  Those of the Shire do not realize, though they had troubles with an evil wizard, all that Frodo did to stop an evil force that would have enslaved them all.  In order to leave the world whole again, he must leave it, and in doing that, he makes himself whole as well.
         This is just the beginning, a new journey is commencing, and a new age has dawned for Middle-earth.  While the joy came for Middle-earth, the true end is “still remote in time and space” (Ryan 29).  There is not a clear, definitive end.  As Gandalf says, “There are other men and other lives, and time still to be” (Return, 81).  Life is still to be lived, even though Frodo has passed out of the world and everything rests in peace, but this peace most likely will not last.  Auden explains, “Good triumphed over Evil so far as the Third Age of Middle-earth is concerned, but there is no certainty that this triumph is final” (60).  In all probability, evil will rise in the next age and the need for a new hero will arise.  Lives pass in and out of time, and Frodo’s has passed over the sea, and we are left with an uncertain end.
         It is questionable if there is hope at the end or if are all doomed to certain death.  All must pass away, whether the elves across the sea or man and hobbit in death.  In the case of Middle-earth, is the victory over Sauron the final victory of all?  C.S. Lewis comments on the trilogy: just as man is impermanent, “every time we win we shall know that our victory is impermanent” (15).  Lewis actually names this the story’s moral: “a recall from facile optimism and wailing pessimism alike, to that hard, yet not quite desperate, insight into Man’s unchanging predicament by which heroic ages have lived” (15).  People must leave behind easy, carefree attitudes along with unfounded fear of death, and simply realize that they are not permanent.  Death is what all must experience, even Frodo, though his is more symbolic.  He destroyed Sauron, but he did not destroy evil; it has merely been setback, and it must be faced again, because evil is not something that can be dealt with physically; it lies within man, “in his greed and pride, in his essential selfishness” (Bettridge 30).  Just as impermanence exists within all, so does a natural evil that cannot be conquered, and must be battled over and over again. 
         It would seem a hopeless case for those of Middle-earth and for all who participate in life, where death and evil abound.  Can hope be a reality when there does not seem to be an end to evil?  All we get from Tolkien is a glimpse of what lay beyond the Grey Havens, the land across the sea.  As Frodo makes the final part of his journey, he looks up, “And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise” (Return 339).  For Frodo, there is hope beyond the pain that he bore in Middle-earth.  There is a land where there is no more hurt or death, where there is healing, but it is separate from the known world of Middle-earth.
         Life must go on whether this hope is a reality or not; how hope may be held onto in the face of despair or carelessness is what we must cope with.  Lewis suggests there needs to be a middle ground between optimism and pessimism (15).  What can be held onto is the good that does exist in the world and the force that holds it in sway.  Just as Sam realized on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, there were many chances for them to turn back, but they made the choice of good (Spacks 91).  It is in preserving this good that man gains his hope.  Though the victory itself is good, it will not last, but “as long as there are brave men of good will, men who ‘will take the Ring, although they do not know the way,’ there is reason to continue.  Life is hopeless, but it is not futile” (Bettridge 30).  There is no hope for life, but that does not mean that life should not be lived, and lived for the good of humanity.
         There is also hope to be found in the final “joy” that good will be triumphant.  One life ends, but it does not mean that is the end of all.  Tolkien describes this joy coming with sorrow and failure, because the opposite of joy is needed for the “joy of deliverance,” which denies absolute defeat and instead gives “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (“Fairy-Stories” 86).  There is a moment of failure, when Frodo decided to keep the Ring, when others were fighting a seemingly hopeless battle at the gates of Mordor; all seems lost, but there is a turn; the eucatastrophe occurs, the happy ending and “the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function” (“Fairy-Stories” 85).  A way was provided for a glimpse of joy seen through Gollum carrying his precious into the Cracks of Doom, the eagles coming to aid the soldiers, and the Ring finally being destroyed.  What makes the story worthwhile is the hope that it will end happy; that good will conquer when all seems lost. 
          The journey has a beginning of uncertainty, a middle full of threats, and an ending of death and Joy.  Surrounding the journey is a landscape full of meaning, carrying the characters through their mission and on their quest.  For those on the journey, the circumstances within and around the journey give it meaning and purpose.  Though at first the situation is unknown: “The individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (Campbell 51).  This is the beginning of the journey.  It is not easily understood why things happen, but there is destiny, there is fate, there is a force, or Being, that wills things to happen.  The unknowable part of the journey is what makes it worth going on because those who travel it want to make it known, and ultimately prove their destiny—that they were meant to take that journey, and they were meant to succeed though at times it seemed doubtful.
         The journey surrounding Frodo and the Fellowship is bound to the Ring; it is a struggle against the Ring to survive.  In this, the characters find the purpose of their journey, and this purpose transforms them, because it is their burden, specifically Frodo’s burden, that they are bound to.  The Ring and the threat it holds is the darkness that must be plunged into.  What is evil about the Ring is that it “finds and binds” in an unnatural way, taking a life that is meant to be lived within one’s own nature, and binding it to someone else’s (Sale 258).  Roger Sale calls the War of the Ring, “a struggle to ‘be natural’ and to be alive and preserve life when it is threatened” (260).  It is a struggle to save oneself, and a world, from possession, to live life in one’s own identity rather than being defined in another.  Sale also notices how Frodo survives beneath this binding power.  Frodo saves himself from the Ring, because he does not bind himself to the “love of power,” but to others, “and that is his heroism” (287).  Frodo binds himself to the possession of the Fellowship and to their purpose, finding his own identity and heroism in carrying out that purpose.
         Frodo’s purpose is found in taking the journey into darkness for the Shire and for Middle-earth; and now he has to let others have it to keep safe, giving the world its peace though it was not easily won.  There were many acts of heroism on the journey that allowed the end of the Third Age to come.  The fight between good and evil is the backdrop of the journey.  As R.J. Reilly says, “In the face of inexorable extinction the only answer that man or hobbit can make is to be heroic” (135).  When good is fighting for survival against evil, heroism is its only choice.  It cannot cower and hide and let evil win, but it needs to take a chance, a risk, so that good may prosper and continue.  Frodo’s heroic acts are not the same as those of Aragorn’s on the field of battle, but his heroism comes from journeying beneath the burden and in his compassion shown toward Gollum. 
         While Frodo is the recognized character, his companions into Mordor, Gollum and Sam, bring out different aspects of the character of Frodo.  Sam and Gollum are still separate characters in and of themselves, but as they travel with Frodo, they become foils of him.  Sam reflects of the good, loyal, and brave hobbit part of Frodo, while Gollum looks into the evil and prideful aspects of Frodo—what the Ring capitalizes on, and what Frodo could become (Bettridge 31).  Verlyn Flieger looks into the Gollum aspect of Frodo—the dark side.  Gollum represents Frodo’s growing desire for the Ring, which eventually consumes him, as he gets closer to Mt. Doom.  Gollum is what Frodo must fight as the Ring becomes heavier and heavier, because he is what Frodo could become if the Ring overtakes him (59).  Besides this dark side, compassion dwells in Frodo, his essential goodness which saves him from himself (Bettridge 31).  Frodo’s heroism is discovered as he shows compassion to Gollum and the desire to tame rather than destroy.  He can see himself in the hobbit-like creature that is also “struggling to stay alive against powers insuperably great” (Sale 273).  This compassion and heroism is ultimately put to the test at the Cracks of Doom.  William Bettridge explains, “The Ring, then, reveals the essential dichotomy of the human soul, a dichotomy represented mythically in Frodo’s moment of truth at the Cracks of Doom” (30).  Mt. Doom is where Frodo can claim the Ring for himself or destroy it to save the world for others.  He ultimately fails, and gives into the temptation of pride, yet he is saved by the compassion that he showed Gollum earlier on his journey (30).  It is Frodo’s compassion that saves Middle-earth, not his strength.  Frodo see his acts as essential: “In the Marshes, on the foul plains before Mordor, down the dark road to Minas Morgul, and up the stairs into the mountains to Cirith Ungol, we see no fight of good and evil but only the effects of being alive and the consequences of giving in to death” (Sale 275).  Frodo is doing what he can to survive, to go there and back again, and fulfill the mission he was given.  Having compassion on Gollum got him closer to completing his task and, ultimately, completed the task for him.  He walks beneath the burden because he is determined and committed to casting it off.
         Frodo’s journey is not just a journey to Mordor or a journey to save the Shire and Middle-earth.  Frodo takes the hero’s journey; an inner journey, one that transforms travelers and gives them wisdom and discovery, though it eventually leads to death in its end.  In his essay on Beowulf, Tolkien reveals that he drew on an aspect of determinism to create his trilogy:  there is an end to everything, and because man is impermanent, purpose is found in heroism.  As Tolkien says in his essay, “Life is transitory: light and life together hasten away” (“Beowulf” 68).  Even Beowulf found the end of his journey in fighting the dragon and dying; this is part of nature and part of the journey of life, because life is impermanent.
         Before Frodo reaches the end, he has a journey of self-discovery, where he discovers life itself, and it changes and transforms him—every moment on life’s journey brings change and newness of thought and perception (Auden 41).  Every moment is fleeting, as humanity seeks to discover meaning and purpose—what they are made to do.  The human nature is on the quest of self-discovery, either to make life better, or simply to find life itself (Auden 40).  Bettridge calls this the “journey into sorrow,” forever marking the person who travels it (29).  The old Frodo of the Shire was lost in the transforming darkness of Mordor, but he gained a wiser self.  This journey gives wisdom, but it is the wisdom of life, the wisdom of impermanence.  Frodo went on the journey and brought back peace and prosperity to his home, but he cannot benefit from them (Flieger 52-53).  Frodo’s journey into sorrow illuminates humanity’s impermanence, but the trilogy also reveals that life will go on, though the self passes away.  “I tried to save the Shire,” Frodo tells Sam as he is leaving Middle-earth, “and it has been saved, but not for me.  It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (Return 338).
         Frodo cannot stay in Middle-earth but must pass over the sea.  Frodo, at the Grey Havens, is finally seen as his own character, not one with aspects in two other characters.  He is whole and unburdened—only he can pass over the seas, and he must do it on his own, without his faithful Sam, who also needs to be whole in himself.  Frodo puts away the memories and the pain of bearing the Ring, and passes away in a “search for peace in another world, across the sea” (Sale 282-83).  There is peace and wholeness in this moment.  It is sad, but it is as it should be.  Frodo reached the end of his journey; he cannot stay in Middle-earth forever.  Roger Sale sees this as natural as well: “he must go to the Grey Havens and over the sea to the west with Gandalf and the faded elves because he too was part of their age, the instrument of its end and of the world’s living still to have more cycles and more ages” (282).  He was part of the saving of the world, but his heroic act happened in the Third Age, which has ended.  His life in Middle-earth and his journey are over.
         Frodo passes out of Middle-earth more than just the hero.  He passes into the West with what he found on his journey.  Bettridge says, “Heroes of the Quest are in fact in search of something, although they are largely unaware of it or its true nature until the end” (28).  Something must be found in the quest, though it may not be what the hero is really looking for.  Frodo, on this journey to the self and, ultimately, death, finds the significance of time and sacrifice in light of the life’s impermanence.  Frodo does succeed in his quest and journey, and he will gain a new, wiser, mature self, but this came at a price, “and its possible possession is as painful as it is valuable” (Bettridge 29).  It is painful because it is sacrifice. 
         Flieger, in her comparison of the heroes Frodo and Aragorn, sees Frodo as the little man, or “everyman,” who took on the weight of the world.  His task was to bear the weight of others, the weight that rightfully should have been Aragorn’s (61).  Frodo is the fairy-tale hero, not the hero of epic tales, but he has been made to suffer the typical loss of those heroes (60).  Just as Beowulf fought the dragon and died, Frodo had to bear the Ring and pass away from Middle-earth, but the Ring should not have been his to bear.  Frodo sacrificed his right as a fairy-tale hero to those like Aragorn, who became king instead of taking Isildur’s Bane to the Cracks of Doom.  But this is as it should be.  Flieger says, “Their stories end not happily but fittingly, and that is as it should be…the sacrifice is all the greater for being made by one so small” (61).  The fact that Frodo, a small hobbit from the Shire, completed the task, makes it one of those stories that “really mattered,” as Sam would say.  Aragorn had to be king, and Frodo had to leave his burden at the Grey Havens and pass away.
         The importance of sacrifice is all the more potent when looking at the passing away of time, the reflection of impermanence.  The willingness to be impermanent on one’s own makes the sacrifice all the greater for those who are still on life’s journey.  C.S. Lewis calls this impermanence the moral of the story; R.J. Reilly would agree with him as, “the devouring nature of time itself is borne in on us…we learn again from the trilogy that all things are Time’s fools, that all comes within the compass of his bending sickle” (145).  Time cannot be escaped, and all things must pass—the elves over the sea and humanity to death.  One cannot be ignorant of the passing away of time; Campbell writes, “The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will.  And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all” (238).  The myth helps in understanding the relationship between man and the cosmos; how time works through the lives that are continually being born and those that are continually dying.  There is an outside source that continues, and “wills,” while life on earth lives and dies.  Campbell adds, “The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is…he does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment…as destroying the permanent with its change” (243).  Though time does not change, those living within time do—humanity is not permanent.  The hero lives in the moment, as things are developing and changing, not living in the past or present; he instead embraces the great future that is unknown and unending, while his personal future will have a physical end.
         Tolkien put the journey of the hero in perspective: “In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death” (“Beowulf” 81).  There is the moment of birth—the beginning.  There is the moment of death—the end.  Time is a journey and encompasses several individual journeys.  All must take the journey, and all must be impermanent, except in the way we live, and in that we must be heroic as Frodo was heroic.  Our journey, though it is brief and must end, has an element of hope.  Though we are doomed to death, we have a moment in which we live, and we must live hopefully, in order to make our death another beginning, rather than an ending. 
         In his essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien looked at how fairy-stories possess a journey that can speak into the lives of both children and adults.  There is a purpose in each life:

         Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey: that journey upon which it is certainly not better to travel hopefully than to arrive, though we must travel hopefully if we are to arrive.  But it is one of the lessons of fairy-stories (if we can speak of lessons of things that do not lecture) that on callow, lumpish, and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom. (66) 

The end, the arrival, is an essential part of the journey, but so is hope because if hope can be held on to through the peril, the sorrow, and the shadow of death, wisdom will be found.  Though The Lord of the Rings may be a journey to death, it is also a hopeful journey to wisdom, which makes the impermanence of life something heroic and to be held on to.

The Journey: The Fulfillment of the Story
         Through the journey, and the quest within it, the story brings the attainment of what was sought after, or simply, gaining what one did not have before.  The journey also illuminates the world of the story; it allows the world to be seen and understood so that the message will be more comprehensible.  Lionel Basney sees both the world and the quest: “The quest reveals and illuminates the world; the world provides the determining conditions of the quest” (9).  Along the same lines, Basney says, “The narrative unfolds the world to us” (8).  Without a context of the world, the quest would not make sense; without the quest, the created world would not be seen.  This is true in reality.  Without a world surrounding and impacting us, our lives would not change; without the lives within the world, the world would not be illuminated.  Auden also comments on the history of the created world: “Its history may be unusual but it must not contradict our notion of what history is, an interplay of Fate, Choice, and Chance” (Auden 50).  These three aspects are essential parts to history and the beliefs of humanity.  We believe in a Fairy World because its history makes sense to us.  It reflects history as we know it to be in the world we live in.  Just as we need a notion of context in which to live, the journey within a story needs a context to illuminate.
         In the Secondary World, stories allow us to see the journey illuminated and view it without any hindrances.  The journey, though it must end, is part of the eucatastrophe because it incorporates a joyous turn, which depends on the whole story, the whole journey, for the setting of that turn (“Fairy-Stories” 86).  The hope found in the goodness and heroism of The Lord of the Rings allows it to be seen all the clearer because the story involves the possibility of failure.  This tragedy, or dycatastrophe, was overcome with the eucatastrophe that brings “a little of that strange mythical fairy-story quality, greater than the even described” (“Fairy-Stories” 86).  The eucatastrophe of The Lord of the Rings is a moment when all hope is lost; at that moment of despair, the good in the world is found and conquers all.
         The myth, the fairy-tale, where the journey takes place also digs deeper as the joy in the fairy-story gives a “glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (“Fairy-Stories” 88).  It does not simply answer the sorrow in the world but answers the question: “Is it true?”  The answer: if the truth of that world suspends our disbelief, then, in that world, it is true (“Fairy-Stories” 88).  The fairy-tale goes even further; the eucatastrophe, the good catastrophe—“a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur”—gives an even greater picture of the potential of the fairy-story because the eucatastrophe is found in the Christian story.  This is the Great Eucatastrophe.  The fairy-story of the Gospels, through the birth of Christ and the Incarnation, carries the eucatastrophe into reality, and “there is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true” (88-89).  This Great Eucatastrophe is real and true; it is supreme; the joy found in it is “the very taste” of truth—the truth that “God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves.  Legend and History have met and fused” (89). 
         Humanity is given the hope of the Great Eucatastrophe, the supreme truth of the redemption of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.  The story is not finished, however.  The Christian who holds on to this hope “has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed” (“Fairy-Stories” 89).  The journey of life must still be carried on but with a purpose, which is not simply the work of good, but the work and calling of the Lord.  There is no escaping life’s impermanence, but there is always hope to be held on to, because there is Joy, a Great Eucatastrophe, that can redeem.
         The journey is an essential part of both the story and life, because the journey is change; it is the sufferance, hope, and death occurring in every life.  Frodo walked to Mt. Doom and back again and returned a changed hobbit.  If the story did not have a beginning that moved toward an end, it would not be much of a story at all; nothing would happen.  Human lives are continually changing moment by moment; they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  The journey, then, fulfills the reflection of human life because the journey is essentially human; there is death, but there also is hope, and that cannot be forgotten.  Though life’s impermanence seems to defy all hope, there is hope in the act of life itself and through joy found in the Great Eucatastrophe.  The road does go ever on and on, as time follows its weary course, but the road cannot be followed to its end.  Each life walks what it can and then humbly bows out, because there is a land beyond the sea that brings peace, and a “swift sunrise.”

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